West Australians waiting a year to see public hospital specialists as Fiona Stanley Hospital queue grows

Year long queue to see public hospital specialists

Almost 80,000 West Australians are waiting to see a public hospital specialist to find out if they need surgery, with an average waiting time of more than a year at Fiona Stanley Hospital.

The latest surgical outpatient clinic figures — the “waiting to wait” patients who need to be assessed for surgery — show that at the end of December last year, 79,517 patients were waiting for their first appointment.

That number is almost 10,000 — or 14 per cent — more than at the same time in 2016.

GPs routinely refer patients who might need surgery to the clinics so they can be assessed and, if necessary, put on the official elective surgery waiting list, which has more than 22,000 people. The average surgical outpatient wait across Perth tertiary hospitals is 8.8 months, an increase of 1.3 months since December 2016.

The waiting list at FSH is staggering, with 25,541 patients facing an average wait of just over 12 months for their first appointment, while 26,006 are queued at Sir Charles Gairdner and waiting an average of 10 months.

Australian Medical Association WA president Omar Khorshid said the figures were further evidence of the enormous strain that hospitals were under. “We’re not keeping up with demand, and every indicator for emergency departments and elective surgery and now outpatient clinics are pointing to a worsening situation,” Dr Khorshid said.

“The people who determine the level of activity is the Government, so they either have to put more money into health or be upfront and say we don’t have the money and we can’t provide this or that service.”

The Health Department said waiting times for patients’ first surgical outpatient appointment needed to improve, but not everyone referred to a clinic would need treatment at that site. “Patients are seen and treated according to clinical need and the prioritisation of urgent cases impacts on the waiting times for semi-urgent and non-urgent cases,” it said.

Hospitals were reviewing theirprocesses to identify patients who no longer needed assessment or could be managed elsewhere.